Etching
Dated 1983
21″ x 32″
I first met Alexander, or Sasha, Kalugin in Moscow in 1983 just after his release from the “White Posts” mental institution. He had been incarcerated with a diagnosis of “sluggish schizophrenia.” My late husband, Don McNeill, was the CBS News Moscow Bureau Chief at the time. We did a story about Kalugin’s plight for the Evening News with Dan Rather. By a strange “coincidence,” Kalugin was offered release shortly after the story aired. The guards asked him for one of his paintings and us for a pair of Adidas sneakers before escorting him out.
I recently connected with Sasha and his wife, Tamara, and asked about this etching, “Pamyat” or “Memory.” It is the Apostle Luke and the monastery in Pskov, an area in west Russia, bordering on Estonia and Latvia. As for the curious figure in the center of the image, Tamara explained, “In Soviet psychiatry, everything was built on the patient’s fear of hospital staff, doctors and nurses, and orderlies. A nurse in front of a sick person is like a scarecrow, so Sasha had a scarecrow in a medical gown at work. On the head of the scarecrow there is a hat like a hiking helmet, or a pot, broken, old, also for intimidation.”